Cookbook Review: Eating in the Middle

Sunday, March 27, 2016

Eating in the Middle initially caught my eyes because I saw Aran Goyoaga (one of my favorite photographers) photographing the cookbook. I didn’t read Andie’s memoir It Was Me All Along so I have no preconceived notion of who Andie Mitchell is. I’ll just dive into the book and the recipes.

Her baked banana donut recipe was the first one that caught my interest. The recipe itself was pretty easy to make but texture-wise, it was not what I would imagine a donut would taste like. My husband is a huge donut fan and he didn’t approve. If anything, it leaned more toward banana bread. I also tried the Greek yogurt pancakes but they were just ok, nothing spectacular to be honest. That light, fluffy texture that you would expect from a good pancake was definitely missing.

I was about to give up on trying more recipes but the tomorroats with blood orange and mint salsa sounded really good. We usually buy about 20 pounds of citrus from the farmers market every weekend so I had a lot of blood oranges lying around. I didn’t have any excuse not to try it. Finally a winner! The blood orange and mint combo was so refreshing and added so much flavor to the oats. I will definitely be making this again. The last recipe that I made was the skillet apple crisp with whiskey caramel sauce since both my husband and I like apple desserts. The whiskey caramel sauce added so much goodness to that dessert and definitely made us feel like we weren’t cheated out of a real dessert. We also had it with a few scoops of vanilla ice cream so that might have defeated the healthy factor.

Overall Eating in the Middle has a lot of healthy recipes but they might be too healthy for my taste. I applaud Andie’s effort for creating these healthy and delicious recipes but felt like some of the recipes could have had better substitution in ingredients to really make the dishes shine. My standard for healthy eating without sacrificing the delicious factor would be Diana Henry’s a Change in Appetite and haven’t found a book to beat that. To pit Andie Mitchell against Diary Henry is definitely unfair so you'll have to check out Eating in the Middle for yourself.